SIMFEROPOL – A referendum on joining Russia is currently not on the agenda of the Kherson region, which plans to focus on returning to normal life first, Kirill Stremousov, the deputy head of the regional military-civil administration, told Sputnik.
“Today, the priority for us is the stabilization of life in the Kherson region. Issues of paying pensions, social benefits, and launching the region’s economy are being resolved. The referendum is not on the agenda today,” Stremousov said.
He added that a referendum is possible after the situation in the region fully stabilizes.
On Tuesday, Stremousov told Sputnik that the Kherson region plans to hold a referendum on joining Russia, and it is estimated that at least 60-70 percent of the local population will agree to become a part of Russia.
Russia launched its special military operation in Ukraine on February 24, after the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR) appealed for help in defending themselves against Ukrainian provocations.
Moscow has said that the aim of its special operation is to demilitarize and “denazify” Ukraine. In response to Russia’s operation, Western countries have rolled out a comprehensive sanctions campaign against Moscow and have been supplying weapons to Ukraine.
The Russian military has already taken control of the Kherson Region in the south of the country and part of the Zaporizhzhia Region. Military-civilian administrations have been formed in the regions, broadcasting of Russian TV channels and radio stations was launched, and trade ties with Crimea are being restored.
From the very outset of this pandemic, the topic of natural infection has been a taboo. To suggest that anyone might have been better off risking infection and thereby gaining immunity from a respiratorial virus rather than hiding under the sofa for two years was seen as outrageous and irresponsible.
My theory is that the reason has always been political. And that’s tragic.
Generations have gone by that have understood it. A life strategy to flee all pathogens is deeply dangerous. The immune system, in order to be trained to protect against severe disease, needs exposure. Not to all things, of course, but to many pathogens that are not finally debilitating or fatal. We’ve evolved with pathogens in what Sunetra Gupta calls a “dangerous dance.” This dance is unavoidable, especially for fast-mutating viruses like SARS-CoV-2.
And yet from the beginning, this knowledge seemed to be lost. This is gravely embarrassing since it’s been known for 2,500 years. It was worse than just lost. As a person who wrote almost daily during the pandemic, I too was careful not to discuss this topic with too much bluntness. We all felt the political pressure to stay silent or at least cloud our prose with euphemisms.
The single most controversial sentence of the Great Barrington Declaration was this one: “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity, is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.”
That talk about building up immunity is what drove people bonkers, as if no one was somehow allowed to utter a settled scientific truth. And yet long before Fauci began to speak as if getting infected was the worst possible fate, he was more honest.
Even I knew (from what I learned in 9th grade and what my mother taught) that the pandemic would only end with endemicity naturally earned. That is precisely what is happening. The CDC’s publication MMWR printed a seroprevalence study showing that from December 2021 to February 2022 – that period during which it seemed like everyone in the country got covid – went from 33.5% to 57.7%. In children, it went from 44.2% to 75.2%. It’s higher in both groups now.That the study got no real attention to it shows that we are fast moving toward the end, and how? Not through vaccination, which protects against neither infection nor transmission. It ends with everyone meeting the virus. There is of course some threshold of herd immunity with this virus, though it keeps rising with each mutation, requiring ever more rounds of infection to achieve it. It is surely higher than 70% but probably less than 90% depending on population mobility and other factors.We can look at that data today and wonder. What if we had never locked down? What if we had gone on with life as normally while urging those in risk categories to wait it out a bit while we achieved endemicity? How long would it have taken to get there?
Might it have been over by the summer of 2020? It is possible. It’s hard to know such counterfactuals with precision, but it does seem highly likely that the lockdowns achieved nothing good, caused tremendous damage, and also unnecessarily prolonged the pandemic. In addition, they degraded everyone’s immune system: we didn’t just avoid covid but everything else too.
And the main reason was due to the unwillingness of public health authorities to talk about actual science. When Fauci was asked about natural immunity in September 2021, he said “I don’t have a really firm answer for you on that. That’s something that we’re going to have to discuss regarding the durability of the response…I think that is something that we need to sit down and discuss seriously.”
The WHO even changed its definition of herd immunity to exclude natural infection as a factor! The whole institution gave itself over to vaccine sales based on wild exaggerations of their effectiveness while all-but-denying robust and broad immunity through exposure.
A key political factor to natural immunity is that it does not call on government to assume totalitarian controls to stop a virus. It presumes the operations of a normal society. The government wanted all power and deployed it to stop the virus. Therefore, science was out of the question, replaced by political propaganda from start to finish.
It’s not well understood that the US policy from the very outset accepted and adopted a zero covid approach. That gradually unraveled over time as unworkable. Trump’s own advisors tricked him into believing that he could achieve that just like Xi Jinping did. He fell for it, and pushed the two weeks to flatten the curve under the belief that this would make the virus go away. His rhetoric that day set the stage for more than two years of utter nonsense.
And here we are all this time later and top headlines are finally admitting what should have been obvious from the beginning. For a virus this prevalent, it ends with widespread natural immunity. Here’s the Bloomberg headline:
The rest of the article is designed to walk back that core claim. We are still not ready to face the terrible realities that the lockdowns achieved nothing and that the vaccines did not end the pandemic. The taboo subject of meeting the virus is still today what it was 30 months ago, nearly unsayable.
My theory is that this is entirely for political reasons. They hatched a wild plan to control a virus that would come and go like all such viruses in history, and so therefore they had to pretend their efforts were essential to the great task. They never were. That’s the bitter reality.
Reflecting on this topic of exposure and immunity eventually leads a person to realize that we don’t need centralized control, coercion, and dictatorial power to manage a pandemic. Pandemics are unavoidable but they largely manage themselves while the best-possible outcomes rest with the intelligence of individuals informing choices based on their own risk assessment. (I feel like I’ve been writing some version of that sentence for 33 months.)
And this speaks to the big problem we have today. The people who did this to us have not admitted error and probably won’t. Despite all the failures, these same people are gearing up for another round of lockdowns based once again on the ideology that the worst-possible fate for anyone is to face a virus naturally and bravely.
Think about this: our lords and masters are saying that our only choice in the face of any prevalent pathogen is to hunker down, don’t hold parties, don’t send kids to school, don’t go to church, don’t go work, don’t travel, and instead just wait for them to make a fancy serum to inject in our arms, which we must accept whether we like it or not.
In short, a government that seeks to control all pathogenic spread is one with totalitarian powers that knows not human rights or freedoms.
While countries around the world continue to drop their COVID mandates, Trudeau says Canada’s are here to stay due to the risk from new variants that don’t even exist yet.
“The reality is, as much as people would like to pretend that we’re not, we’re still in a pandemic,” he said.
“There are Canadians who die every single day because of COVID-19 in our hospitals.”
Trudeau adds that vaccine mandates are needed to protect against variants that do not (yet) exist.
“We are still at risk, particularly at risk, as Fall approaches, of new variants.”
“. . . What will also further damage our tourism industry is if we get another wave. If we get more serious impacts from COVID.”
This announcement comes a day after Canadian airline Westjet’s CEO, Alexis von Hoensbroech, spoke out against the mandates.
“As vaccines are not preventing the spreading of the virus since Omicron, there is no more logic to maintain it,” he said.
Indeed, most countries dropped their COVID mandates weeks, if not months ago. The latest country to do so was Italy.
Additionally, even big Pharma and Bill Gates have acknowledged the futility of the current vaccines and their mandates.
In January, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla admitted that two doses of the vaccine “Offer very limited protection if any.” He further claimed his team was working on a new vaccine, “Version 1.1,” to effectively tackle the Omricron variant. However, to date, nothing has been produced.
And last week at the WEF conference in DAVOS, Gates admitted the vaccine wears off fast and doesn’t block transmission.
Three human rights groups have filed a complaint against three top French weapons manufacturers for their complicity in gross war crimes after selling various types of ammunition to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as the major members of the Saudi-led coalition of aggression.
The complaint was lodged by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), the Mwatana for Human Rights as well as Sherpa International at a Paris court on Thursday.
The non-governmental organizations targeted French aerospace company Dassault Aviation, Thales Group and MBDA France, hoping that the legal action will further enlighten the world public opinion about the acts of aggression by the Saudi-led coalition at a time when the United States and its Western allies are seeking to improve ties with the Riyadh regime.
“The [Saudi-led] coalition’s airstrikes have caused terrible destruction in Yemen. Weapons produced and exported by European countries, and in particular France, have enabled these crimes,” Abdulrasheed al-Faqih, Executive Director of Yemeni organization Mwatana for Human Rights, said.
“Seven years into this war, the countless Yemeni victims deserve credible investigations into all perpetrators of crimes, including those potentially complicit,” he added.
Rights groups in France have repeatedly argued that the Paris government’s tacit support for the Saudi-led coalition has prolonged and worsened the Yemen conflict.
French prosecutors are already studying similar complaints filed against UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the French customs authority.
The complaint filed by rights groups against French arms makers comes as the United Nations announced that a truce between warring Yemeni sides had been extended for two months.
The initial two-month truce started at the beginning of the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan on April 2, and was set to expire on Thursday.
“I would like to announce that the parties to the conflict have agreed to the United Nations’ proposal to renew the current truce in Yemen for two additional months,” UN Special Envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg said.
Grundberg added that the truce extension would come into effect “when the current truce period expires, today June 2, 2022 at 19:00 Yemen time (1600 GMT)”.
The Norwegian Refugee Council’s (NRC) Yemen Country Director, Erin Hutchinson, said in a statement after Grundberg’s announcement, “The announcement of the truce extension today shows a serious commitment from all parties to end the senseless suffering of millions of Yemenis.”
She added, “The last two months have shown that peaceful solutions to the conflict are a real option.”
Saudi Arabia launched the devastating war on Yemen in March 2015 in collaboration with its Arab allies and with arms and logistics support from the US and other Western states.
The objective was to reinstall the Riyadh-friendly regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi and crush the Ansarullah resistance movement, which has been running state affairs in the absence of a functional government in Yemen.
While the Saudi-led coalition has failed to meet any of its objectives, the war has killed hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
An Arab NGO has documented 148 Israeli rights violations against Palestinian journalists in the occupied Palestinian territories last month, Anadolu News Agency reports.
In a statement on Wednesday, the Journalists Support Committee said the month of May witnessed a surge in attacks on Palestinian journalists by Israeli forces and settlers.
It termed the attacks as “an attempt to prevent Palestinian journalists from covering Israeli assaults against Palestinians and their holy sites.”
According to the NGO, the Israeli violations varied from arrests, intimidation, shooting, verbal and physical assaults to car-ramming incidents.
It said 11 journalists were detained by Israeli forces in the West Bank during May, while the custody of five others was extended without trial.
“Israeli forces, in collaboration with settlers, disrupted the work of 61 journalists and media institutions while covering Israeli violations in the cities of Jerusalem, Hebron and Jenin,” it added.
The NGO also noted that the social media accounts of 11 Palestinian journalists were suspended for alleged violations of publication rules.
Last month, Al Jazeera journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, 51, was shot dead while covering an Israeli military raid in the West Bank city of Jenin.
Palestinian officials and her employer, Al Jazeera, said she was killed by Israeli forces.
There was no comment from Israeli authorities on the NGO’s report.
Members of parliament today voted 202-117 to keep the current travel ban against unvaccinated Canadians in place.
The Conservatives proposed the motion to have the current travel ban against the unvaccinated lifted.
Trudeau, Jagmeet Singh, and Travel Minister Omar Alghabra voted against the motion, as did virtually every Liberal, NDP, and Bloq Quebecois member.
Conservatives all voted to lift the ban.
“Today, the NDP-Liberal government voted against our common-sense motion that would have returned to pre-pandemic rules and service levels for travel and helped end the delays we’re seeing at airports across the country,” their Conservative’s website reads.
“As Canadian travellers are being subject to extreme delays, line-ups, bottlenecks, and missed connections because of unnecessary protocols, our allies across the world, including the European Union and the United States, have loosened rules for passengers on flights and in airports.”
“. . . Airports have directly cited the Liberals’ policies as the reason for these delays . . .”
“After two long years of the pandemic, Canadians are finally looking to return to normalcy and begin travelling again. Unfortunately, the NDP-Liberal government continues to cling to outdated and unnecessary protocols that are exacerbating delays.”
Conservative members of parliament proposed the motion on May 17. However, Charter rights – such as freedom of movement – were not leveraged to justify their call to drop restrictions.
Instead, “unacceptable wait times” at the airport (for those who are allowed to travel), labour shortages, and economic losses caused by the restrictions were cited.
However, the motion also mentioned that the restrictions were ineffective and that international allies have all dropped their restrictions.
Israel’s Supreme Court has decided that the Palestinian region of Masafer Yatta in the southern hills of Hebron is to be appropriated entirely by the Israeli military and that the local population of more than 1,000 Palestinians is to be expelled. The court’s decision on 4 May was hardly surprising. Israel’s military occupation is not only enforced by soldiers with guns, but also elaborate political, military, economic and legal structures, all of which are dedicated to the expansion of illegal Jewish settlements and the slow — and sometimes not-so-slow — expulsion of the Palestinians.
When Palestinians say that the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), which led to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 and the establishment of the state of Israel on its ruins, is an ongoing unfinished project, they mean exactly that. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the endless torment of Palestinian Bedouins in the Naqab, and now in Masafer Yatta, are all testament to this reality.
However, Masafer Yatta is particularly unique. In the case of occupied East Jerusalem, for example, Israel has made a fallacious, ahistorical claim that the city is the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people. It combined its unsubstantiated narrative with military action on the ground, followed by a systematic process to increase the Jewish population and eject the native inhabitants of the city. Such notions as ‘Greater Jerusalem‘ and legal and political structures, like that of the Jerusalem Master Plan 2000, have all contributed towards turning the once absolute Palestinian majority in Jerusalem into a constantly shrinking minority.
In the Naqab, Israel’s objectives were put into motion as early as 1948, and again in 1951. The process of ethnically cleansing the natives remains in effect to this day.
Although Masafer Yatta is part of the same colonial scheme, its uniqueness stems from the fact that it is situated in Area C of the occupied West Bank. In July 2020, Israel purportedly decided to postpone its plan to annex nearly 40 per cent of the West Bank, perhaps fearing a Palestinian rebellion and unwanted international condemnation. However, the plan went ahead in all but name.
The wholesale annexation of large swathes of the West Bank would mean that Israel would become responsible for the welfare of entire Palestinian communities living therein. As a settler-colonial state, though, Israel wants the land, but not the people. In Tel Aviv’s calculation, annexation without the expulsion of the population could lead to a demographic nightmare, hence Israel’s need to reinvent its annexation plan. De jure annexation may have been “postponed”, but it has continued in de facto terms, which has attracted very little international political and media attention.
The Israeli court’s decision regarding Masafer Yatta, which is already being carried out with the expulsion of the Najjar family on 11 May, is an important step towards the annexation of Area C. If Israel can evict the Palestinian residents of twelve villages, more than 1,000 people, unhindered, more such expulsions can be expected, not only south of Hebron, but across the occupied Palestinian territories.
The Palestinian villagers of Masafer Yatta and their legal representation know very well that no real “justice” can be obtained from the Israeli court system. Nevertheless, they continue to fight the legal war in the hope that a combination of factors, including solidarity in Palestine and pressure from outside, can ultimately succeed in compelling Israel to delay its planned destruction and Judaisation of the whole region.
However, it seems that Palestinian efforts, which have been underway since 1997, are failing. The Israeli Supreme Court decision is predicated on the erroneous and utterly bizarre notion that the Palestinians of that area could not demonstrate that they belonged there prior to 1980, when the Israeli government decided to turn the area into “Firing Zone 918”.
Sadly, the Palestinian defence was based partly on documents from the Jordanian era and official UN records that reported on Israeli attacks on several Masafer Yatta villages in 1966. The Jordanian government, which administered the West Bank until 1967, compensated some of the residents for the loss of their “stone houses” — not tents — animals and other properties that were destroyed by the Israeli military. Palestinians tried to use this evidence to show that they have existed, not as nomadic people but as rooted communities. This was unconvincing to the Israeli court, which favoured the occupation army’s argument over the rights of the native population.
Israeli firing zones occupy nearly 18 per cent of the total area of the West Bank. It is one of several ploys used by the Israeli government to lay a pseudo-legal claim on Palestinian land and, eventually, to claim legal ownership as well. Many of these firing zones exist in Area C, and are one way that Israel appropriates Palestinian land officially with the support of the courts.
Now that the Israeli military has managed to acquire Masafer Yatta — a region covering 32 to 56km2 — based on completely flimsy excuses, it will become much easier to ensure the ethnic cleansing of many similar communities in various parts of occupied Palestine.
While discussions and media coverage of Israel’s annexation scheme in the West Bank and the Jordan Valley have largely subsided, the settler-colonial state is now preparing for gradual annexation. Instead of taking 40 per cent of the West Bank all at once, Israel is now annexing smaller tracts of land and regions, like Masafer Yatta, separately. Tel Aviv will eventually connect all these annexed areas through Jewish settler-only bypass roads to larger Jewish settlement infrastructures in the West Bank.
Not only does this alternative strategy allow Israel to avoid international criticism, but it will also permit the settler-colonial state to annex Palestinian land while incrementally expelling Palestinians. Thus, demographic imbalances will be prevented before they can even occur.
What is happening in Masafer Yatta is not only the largest ethnic cleansing scheme to be carried out by Israel since 1967, but the move should also be considered as the first step in a much larger scheme of illegal land misappropriation, ethnic cleansing and official mass annexation.
Israel must not be allowed to succeed in Masafer Yatta. If it does, its original, mass annexation scheme will become a reality in no time at all.
Israel’s bombardment of the biggest agrochemical warehouse in the besieged Gaza Strip by incendiary artillery shells last year amounts to chemical warfare, a rights group report finds.
On May 15, 2021, the Israeli military launched an artillery attack on the Khudair Pharmaceuticals and Agricultural Tools Company, considered as the largest agrochemical warehouse in the north of the blockaded enclave, setting fire to tons of pesticides, fertilizers, plastics and nylons.
The shelling attack occurred in the midst of the 11-day Israeli war against Gaza Strip, after weeks of violence against Palestinians in Al-Quds and a brutal crackdown on worshipers at the al-Aqsa Mosque, as well as attempts to steal their land in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.
The results of a new investigation in the attack and its consequences by the West Bank-based Palestinian human rights NGO Al-Haq showed that Israel deliberately employed highly flammable munitions in the targeted attack, which burned tons of dangerous pesticides and set off an unfolding environmental disaster.
The FAI Unit built a 3D model of the warehouse after interviewing the locals, consulting international experts and analyzing data obtained from dozens of videos, including CCTV and drone footage, in a bid to establish the circumstances of the blaze, and determine the effects of the release of toxic chemicals.
“Our findings reveal that Israeli forces illegally employed highly flammable munitions in a targeted attack on the warehouse, whose location and contents are known to Israel, setting on fire over 50 tons of hazardous chemicals stored on the site,” said al-Haq.
The report is the first publication by Al-Haq’s newly-established Forensic Architecture Investigation Unit (FAI Unit), a first-of-its-kind collaboration in the Middle East with Forensic Architecture, a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, which conducts spatial and media analysis for NGOs and in international human rights cases.
The shelling created a toxic plume, which engulfed an area of nearly six sq km, leaving local residents struggling with health problems.
“Within the first hour, the toxic plume had affected an area of approximately 5.7 square kilometers — spanning Beit Lahiya and its agricultural zones, as well as the densely populated Jabaliya refugee camp — placing approximately 3,000 homes in its shadow,” the report said, adding that the six-hour-long fire at the warehouse destroyed most of the facility and consuming the majority of its contents.
Al-Haq said that a toxic plume produced by the attack is tantamount to the indirect deploying of chemical weapons.
“Israeli occupation forces’ shelling of the Khudair Agrochemical Warehouse, with knowledge of the presence of toxic chemicals stored therein, is tantamount to chemical weapons through indirect means. Such acts are clearly prohibited… and prosecutable under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court,” the group said in a legal report based on the findings of the investigation.
The probe determined that the Israeli military used several M150 Smoke HC 155mm shells in its attack against the warehouse.
“The dimensions and the smoke tail match the M150 Smoke HC 155mm ammunition developed by the Israeli weapons manufacturer Elbit Systems: an ‘advanced smoke projectile’ and a new type of shell designed to splinter into five separate canisters, all of which emit high-density smoke,” the report said.
It also stressed that the attack on the Khudair agrochemical warehouse was the first in an apparent string of similar attacks by the Tel Aviv regime, intentionally hitting civilian economic infrastructure and the industrial sector.
“On 17 May, two days after the Khudair Warehouse was destroyed, the Fomco Sponge Factory near Jabaliya camp was attacked in a similar manner, causing a large-scale fire. On the same day, over half a dozen other factories and warehouses, located in the industrial zone east of Gaza’s Shejaiyyeh neighborhood, were also bombed,” it stated.
In the latest bombardment campaign of Gaza by Israel in May last year, at least 260 Palestinians, including over 60 children, were killed in a time span of 11 days that began on May 10. The Gaza-based resistance movements retaliated.
The regime was eventually forced to announce a ceasefire, brokered by Egypt, which came into force in the early hours of May 21.
The Gaza Strip, home to some two million people, has been under a blockade imposed by Israel since June 2007.
The 108th anniversary of this event just happened last month. Always feels strange how a century can go by and little details slip through the cracks, forgotten. We thought we knew this story… but then we had to go and dig. {An edition to our new “Forgotten History” series}
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~ Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for “fair use” for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
Africa Day, 25 May, has made an impact. In a rare show of African power and solidarity, several African member states objected to proposed International Health Regulations amendments, discussed at the World Health Assembly 75 this week – a move many believe might shake up the World Health Organization’s dominance.
A well placed source shared: “The resolution on IHR amendments was not passed at the WHA, as African countries were concerned that there was inadequate consultation amongst member states, and the process was being rushed. Botswana read the statement on behalf of the 47 AFRO members and I was personally present.”
According to Reuters, “if Africa continues to withhold support, it could block one of the only concrete reforms expected from the meeting, fraying hopes that members will unite on reforms to strengthen the U.N. health agency’s rules as it seeks a central role for itself in global health policy.”
The IHR seeks to define and detail WHO members’ obligations around public health emergencies and other health matters. The United States government proposed 13 controversial IHR amendments, which give the WHO DG Tedros unilateral power to declare actual or potential health emergencies and expect a response in 48 hours.
The draft proposal yet to be formally decided also aims to change article 59 of the IHR, and would accelerate the implementation of future amendments.
Bear in mind, a few countries at the WHA submitted draft resolutions to the IHR, which would need, at least according to the WHO process, four months to be considered. These countries are Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, European Union and its Member States, Japan, Monaco, Republic of Korea, United Kingdom of Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the United States of America.
The African #WHA75 delegation expressed reservations about these IHR amendments, saying all reforms should be tackled together as part of a “holistic package” at a later stage.
“The African region shares the view that the process should not be fast tracked…,” Moses Keetile, deputy permanent secretary in Botswana’s health ministry, told the assembly on Tuesday on behalf of the Africa region.
“We find that they are going too quickly and these sorts of reforms can’t be rushed through,” said a concerned African delegate in Geneva. The U.S. mission in Geneva did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.
BRIMI emerges: Brazil, Russia, Iran, Malaysia and India
Brazil and Russia form part of the BRICS initiative with Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. Iran and Malaysia are reported to have also expressed reservations to the proposed IHR amendments, while Russia and Brazil seem set to make big moves on international health policies, or possibly even exit the WHO. Meanwhile, India raised audit concerns on irregularities with WHO financials.
A civil society World Health Assembly monitor shared “Just for your interest, from the external audit done by India team, who yesterday during the financial comittee stated that they feel very disappointed that their audit has been ignored by WHO.”
Time line, duplication, and waste of funding resources
The IHR amendments discussions are parallel to talks on a potential new pandemic treaty (#PandemicAccord) , raising concerns over duplication and waste of funding handed to the WHO.
Given the trajectory, it appears that both the IHR amendments and the new pandemic accord, if successful, will converge on the world in 2024, unless countries decide to curtail the WHO’s power and take charge of their health.
This 2024 date was highlighted in the working group on IHR amendments: “Delegates welcomed the final report of the Working Group on strengthening WHO preparedness and response to health emergencies which, among other things, proposed a process for taking forward potential amendments to the IHR (2005). They agreed to continue the group, with a revised mandate and name (the “Working Group on IHR amendments” (WGIHR)) to work exclusively on consideration of proposed IHR amendments. Member States also requested the Director-General to convene an IHR Review Committee to make technical recommendations on the proposed amendments that may be submitted. The Working Group will propose a package of targeted amendments for consideration by the Seventy-seventh Health Assembly.”
“Several developing countries have said that the WHO has too many platforms for negotiation, and it is simply not manageable,” said Nithin Ramakrishnan, consultant for the Third World Network.
Republican senator Ron Johnson … introduced legislation Thursday that would push back against the World Health Organization’s (WHO) overreach and ensure the Senate has power over its pandemic treaty.
The Daily Caller first obtained the legislation, titled the No WHO Pandemic Preparedness Treaty Without Senate Approval Act, which was spearheaded by Johnson and has 15 cosponsors. The bill mentions the WHO creating an intergovernmental negotiating body (INB) and, if passed, would require any agreement produced by the INB to be submitted to the Senate as a treaty in an effort to provide more transparency on the administration.
The lawmakers believe they need to start fighting to prevent the WHO from creating an INB.
“The World Health Organization, along with our federal health agencies, failed miserably in its response to COVID-19. Its failure should not be rewarded with a new international treaty that would increase its power at the expense of American sovereignty. What the WHO does need is greater accountability and transparency,” Johnson told the Daily Caller prior to officially introducing the legislation.
“This bill makes clear to the Biden administration that any new WHO pandemic agreement must be deemed a treaty and submitted to the Senate for ratification. The sovereignty of the United States is not negotiable,” Johnson continued.
Also in the US, Senator Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., is introducing legislation aimed at curtailing the power of the World Health Organization (WHO). This is welcome but ironic, as the amendments were proposed by the US Department of Health and Human Services. The bill, introduced Thursday, would prevent U.S. officials from being bound to orders or Republican directives given by the WHO or it’s branches. “In addition, it would require U.S. officials to oppose changes to the WHO charter until the House and the Senate agree to adopt the change in a joint resolution of Congress.”
Fact checkers spinning denial of sovereignty threat
Meanwhile, there is a clear spin attempt from establishment media against opposition to the IHR amendments and the WHO in general. A FactCheck article states “The World Health Organization can make recommendations after the declaration of a global emergency, but it has no control over any nation’s decisions. Yet conservatives in the U.S. falsely claim that amendments proposed by the Biden administration to existing global health regulations, and a new WHO pandemic treaty, will threaten U.S. sovereignty.”
It is not clear whether the writer fully understands the implications of the proposed IHR amendments, a new #PandemicAccord, sanctions for non-compliance, or the clear erosion of personal autonomy, national sovereignty, and democratic values.
The WHO and the IHR were spotlighted at the World Council for Health’s successful Better Way Conference, and a video presentation by WHO expert Dr Astrid Stuckelberger will soon be released. Dr Stuckelberger reminded the audience that the WHO is a small part of a much bigger UN/WEF machine.
Two years after the disastrous mismanagement of Coronavirus, it’s time the world thinks about and acts on a better way for health than giving power away to the WHO, which ignores its own standards on necessity, reasonableness, and proportionality.
Last year, the CDC published a paper comparing Pediatric COVID-19 Cases in Counties With and Without School Mask Requirements. The authors looked at data from 520 United States counties, concluding that “Counties without school mask requirements experienced larger increases in … case rates … compared with counties that had school mask requirements.” Corona astrologers and face diaper fetishists everywhere have used the findings to argue for forcing healthy children who are at no risk to wear fasks masks for multiple hours each school day.
More county-level data on American infection rates and mask mandates has since become available, and two Toronto scientists have taken the opportunity to replicate the study, looking now at 1,832 counties. In a turn of events that will surprise nobody, they find that the larger dataset shows that mask mandates actually do zero, and that prior findings were almost surely an illusion.
Here are masked vs. unmasked case rates, using a smaller data pool similar to that from the CDC study:
Week 0 is the week of school reopening after the summer holidays.
Yes, the maskless counties seem to do worse! Yet the Toronto authors point out that the original CDC study only considered infection rates through the second week after schools reopened, which turned out to be “exactly the peak of school case numbers for [their] sample of counties.” This obscured the fact “that cases quickly declined in later weeks and did so faster in counties without mask mandates.” Even the smaller sample used by the CDC study, in other words, showed no difference in masked vs. unmasked counties by the six-week mark.
The replication, with a much bigger dataset, meanwhile, showed that maskless counties never led infections at all:
Note that, in the larger sample, the maskless start out with lower rates of infections and catch up; in the smaller sample, they started out with higher rates which collapsed more quickly.
The authors note that the CDC study, by ending their analysis on 4 September 2021, effectively excluded counties with a school-start date after 14 August, which entailed an oversampling of southern states. I’ll fill in the blanks here: Counties in the American south tend to have fewer school mask requirements, and also to experience late summer infection spikes related to high temperatures and extensive reliance on climatisation.
Although masks have become the most clearly discredited measure deployed against SARS-2 (which is saying something), they just won’t go away. Even in places that have lifted all Corona restrictions, a great many people continue to mask in public, and it seems likely that many countries – Germany among them – will retain vestigial mask requirements indefinitely, probably for years. Masking is a totally unsupported superstitious practice that does nothing against viral infection, and yet for precisely this reason, no amount of evidence will ever convince the maskers to stop.
It is now nearly three decades since the Unites States adopted the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq. While much has been written about the containment of Iraq, there has been very little in-depth analysis of this policy when it comes to Iran. In a book that is going to be released on March 31, 2008, entitled The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge), I attempt to address this shortcoming by investigating when and why the US policy of containment of Iran came about, how it evolved, and where it stands today.[1] To the extent that Israel has been involved in US policy making, the study will also include the role that Israel has played in the containment of Iran. Also, since the fate of Iran has been inextricably linked to that of Iraq, occasionally the investigation will overlap with the containment of Iraq.
The policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq originated during the Carter Administration, but it was not until the Clinton Administration that the expression “dual containment” became popular. … continue
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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